


Telling jokes lands you in the Gulag

by sayfilmagain



Series: These things take time [1]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Drunkenness, Everyone Wants Illya, F/M, Gen, Humor, Illya is not a humourless soviet block of marble, Light-Hearted, M/M, Minor Illya Kuryakin/Gaby Teller, POV Gaby Teller, Pining, Post-Canon, almost non-existent illya/napoleon, dumb illya, lots of dropped articles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:20:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25691224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sayfilmagain/pseuds/sayfilmagain
Summary: Illya is not an easy guy to get to know, but a couple drunken conversations and some humour help Gaby and Napoleon to understand him a little better.---'It had been at that moment that Napoleon, sipping his fifth or sixth glass of remarkably high-quality vodka, with the woollen blanket still draped around his shoulders like a cape, had leaned towards her and asked with genuine incredulity, “Is he having fun?”“I didn’t know he could,” she had said, shaking her head, eyes wide and they had both slumped into overtired fits of laughter.'
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin & Napoleon Solo & Gaby Teller, Illya Kuryakin/Gaby Teller, Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo
Series: These things take time [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1864750
Comments: 22
Kudos: 76





	1. Ivana Ivanovna

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, yes, the film has been out for five years and everyone is over it, but I'm not. I'm especially not over Illya who is a character with so much potential and after reading pretty much every fic in the fandom (thank you to all who have written them!) I thought I would have a go at interpreting these three idiots. I wanted to write something with some nods to the very complicated and ugly history but that also fits into the light-hearted silliness of the genre.  
> I also think Illya has more social skills than Napoleon and Gaby often give him credit for.

_“Kuryakin! Kuryakin! Do Ivana Ivanovna, please!”_ The cry was taken up by the crowd of young soldiers that gathered around Illya. 

Gaby looked across the table at Napoleon who had one eyebrow cocked curiously. She felt that she’d seen that look of bemusement on his face more in the past few hours than she had in the rest of their three months of acquaintance and she was sure that she had mirrored it every time. The subject of their disbelief was the same Illya Kuryakin who was now being hauled to his feet, from a camping chair that shouldn’t have been able to hold all of him. 

His face was flushed with drink and laughter under a few days’ worth of stubble. And as if that wasn’t absurd enough—seeing him unshaved, his golden hair pushed casually back from his high forehead instead of slicked firmly from a severe part, the top three buttons of his khaki shirt gaping to reveal throat and a hint of collarbone—Gaby could see more of his sharp, even teeth than she ever had before as he _laughed_. He was swatting eager Soviet hands away from him, shaking his head, trying to retreat, but the young men were determined.

Gaby and Napoleon shared another look. 

They had spent the last three weeks together in Sweden where a mission had unexpectedly taken them and where even Waverly’s bizarre idealism hadn’t found a place for Illya Kuryakin, KGB killing machine. So he had, through his Russian connections, spent his time waiting for them on a Soviet vessel off the coast of Finland under the guise of training its young soldiers in God only knew what. He had orchestrated their extraction in the middle of a freezing, blustery night by boat after Gaby and Napoleon had had a narrow escape from Stockholm in the back of an unsuspecting grocery truck. They had walked several miles in the biting cold to find him silent and still in a powerboat pulled up alongside a quiet pier, at the exact coordinates Gaby had deciphered a week prior. It was a little fishing village called Härnas where Illya had waited for them frown dusk til dawn every night since he’d radioed them the coordinates. 

Gaby remembered the way the silhouette of his broad shoulders had sloped in relief as they came, bickering, teeth clacking together, finally within earshot of him. He’d leapt up onto the pier, thrown a woollen blanket over Napoleon and then folded Gaby’s body into the warmth of his coat, tucking her frozen hands under the fabric of his sweater so that they stung against the sudden, overwhelming warmth of his body. 

“Let’s get you out of here,” he had said, herding them onto the boat. He had pulled away from the pier as quietly as the motor would allow, one hand steering while the other kept Gaby firmly under his arm. She hadn’t had the energy to fight his characteristic tyrannical tenderness and had settled against his broad chest, resting her face against his neck. He had wordlessly ignored Napoleon slumping against the two of them in the space Gaby’s shivering body had left between Illya’s knees, spreading the blanket over all three of them, continuing in the typical stoic Illya vein of doing the right thing quietly without complaint. 

But as soon as they had climbed aboard the Russian vessel half an hour later, captained by a Ukrainian naval officer, Oliynik, whom Illya had apparently known for years, everything Gaby and Napoleon had come to expect from Illya had been undermined. The three of them had shuffled inside to find a dozen or so men in the warm bowels of the ship in a cloud of smoke and vodka vapours. Gaby and Napoleon had been overwhelmed by the roar of noise and cheer that greeted them and then by pure shock when Illya had downed a shot of vodka handed to him in one gulp.

“Mission is over,” he had said with a shrug—had Gaby ever before seen him shrug?—before they both found themselves in reception of little tin cups full of the same.

_“Very secret, important, super-spy mission is over and now we drink!”_ the man Illya would momentarily identify as his old friend Oliynik had said, and Gaby had understood his carefully clear Russian well enough to smile and be bewildered. 

Since then, that was all she felt she’d been able to do. Illya had reassured them that they would be landing on the Polish/German border at midday where a car would be waiting to take them to an airport and eventually home, or to New York as Illya preferred to call it, and in the meantime, it appeared that Illya intended to drink. 

Gaby and Napoleon had gamely, if a little dizzily accepted his invitation to join in what was evidently a bit of a party and both had been shocked to be on the receiving end of what Gaby could only think of a dazzling smile. Since then, she had been astounded again and again as Illya had laughed at jokes that her Russian wasn’t good enough to follow, had sung along to folksongs in a booming tenor that shook her if she stood too close to him, had put seven young men into headlocks in a row, one after another as they attempted to topple him. It had been at that moment that Napoleon, sipping his fifth or sixth glass of remarkably high-quality vodka, with the woollen blanket still draped around his shoulders like a cape, had leaned towards her and asked with genuine incredulity, “Is he _having fun_?”

“I didn’t know he _could_ ,” she had said, shaking her head, eyes wide and they had both slumped into overtired fits of laughter.

Illya had joined them then, his sharp eye, even after all the drink he’d imbibed, from the other end of the echoing room, spotting straight away that they were making fun of him.

“Tell me everything,” he had said, then, waving his hand dismissively at the men around them, “these idiots don’t speak a word of English.”

His eyes had been bright with curiosity, but more than that, _need_ to know what had happened in his absence and Gaby had felt oddly satisfied by it. Because ever since she had seen him, loose and friendly and open among his fellow Soviets, something cruel and hurtful had settled into her stomach. Here she had been flattering herself for the last three months thinking she’d been making a friend of someone feral, when all along he’d been more capable of friendly intimacy than either herself or Napoleon truly were. Illya was not the cold fish they had assumed him to be, he just hadn’t been as interested in either of them as they were in him, and seeing him laugh with other people, seeing his usually guarded face so open had made Gaby irrationally jealous. 

Napoleon seemed only amused, slapping Illya on the back several times during the night and exclaiming things like, "I knew you had a heart all along, tin man!" his blue eyes twinkling delightedly whenever he got a rejoinder from the Russian. "Fitting. This metaphor means you're brainless scarecrow. I approve." But Gaby knew better than to believe anything Napoleon Solo ever said or did could be interpreted using logic and reason. 

Regardless, when Illya had come to them, his icy eyes trained first on her face and then on Napoleon’s with fixed attention, Gaby had felt soothed. They had told him every detail and he had predictably chastised them for doing things he perceived as reckless, punched Napoleon in the shoulder a few times, examined Gaby’s injured wrist and scraped knuckles with gentle probing fingers, and returned to them. All of a sudden, however, the young men around them were dragging him away again.

“ _Ivana! Ivana! Ivana!”_ chanting in one voice, clapping their hands together. Someone put an apron over his head and Illya shot Oliynik a look that Gaby would have shuddered under, a look that promised pain. His friend only laughed before tying a kerchief around Illya’s head in the manner of a Russian peasant woman.

_“And who will be Marylin?”_ Illya asked. Gaby saw him reach a hand out to grip someone’s shoulder as he very nearly stumbled and she realised with a laugh that he was actually drunk, certainly more drunk than either herself or Napoleon — a definite first.

_“We don’t have a Marylin, but we have an Audrey_ ,” Oliynik pushed a young soldier ahead of himself. He was dark, he had thickly lashed eyes and he was so slight Gaby recognised him instantly as someone, like so many she’d grown up amongst, who hadn’t had enough to eat as a child. 

_“Comrades!”_ Oliynik called out over the hubbub and everyone quieted down, some of the soldiers found seats. He gestured at Gaby and Napoleon with a magnanimous wave, _“and guests!"_

_"A demonstration of the difference between an American and a Soviet woman.”_ And with his theatrical hand he gestured now to Illya and the slight boy who stood next to him. The boy batted his lashes and smiled, Illya glowered, although the corner of his full lip was twitching. Everyone, even Napoleon who was rolling his eyes, laughed. 

_“Audrey, what time did you wake up this morning?”_

_“Oh dear! I can’t remember! This morning is such a blur — I was so busy! I had to write a check for my black nanny, a shopping list for my black cook and put on my make-up and do_ something _with my hair before going to the salon!”_ The boy spoke in a falsetto and an accent Gaby didn’t recognise, so she really had to focus to understand him.

_“And you, Ivana Ivanovich?”_

_“A soviet woman has no time or need for sleep,”_ Illya said in his low, rumbling voice, lighting a cigarette, _“she listens carefully to drunk men in the kommunalki, writing down their jokes for the KGB.”_

A frisson of laughter ran through everyone watching and Gaby was reminded of how uneasy she’d been the last and only other time Illya had had a drink with her and Napoleon after Istanbul when he’d told them a few choice jokes that had made Napoleon laugh and Gaby look searchingly into his cold, hard eyes. 

“How come Lenin used to go everywhere in loafers, but Stalin always wore boots?” he had asked Napoleon who’d been draped bonelessly over an armchair and shook his head, never having heard the joke before, “I don’t know man. Why?” 

“Because in Lenin’s time, Russia was only ankle deep in shit.” Napoleon had spluttered and laughed, and Gaby had made eye-contact with Illya feeling like she was being tested. He had been unreadable, but Gaby couldn’t quite trust herself to laugh even in the time of Khrushchev and De-Stalinization and after a successful mission and a relieved, if unacknowledged, kiss.

“CIA, MI6 and KGB all decide to have a contest to decide which is better spy organisation,” Illya had continued. Napoleon had snorted unattractively, and that had been enough to break the tension a little and make Illya and Gaby share a look, almost a smile

“I can imagine that.”

“Aim of the exercise is to apprehend specific hare in the middle of vast, lovely, natural woodland. CIA start first. They launch twelve month operation, extensive training, vocal coaches, placing covert agents in every corner, infiltrating woodland government, bribing, tracking devices everywhere. At the end, hare escapes, they completely fail the original mission, but they have full control of high command in woodland and have secured economic takeover and where the woodland used to be, now is suburb and strip malls.”

“Sounds accurate,” Napoleon had said.

“Next, MI6. They send in two untrained, underfunded agents who escape woodland by skin of teeth—“ “— _the_ skin of _their_ teeth—” “Yes, yes. Skin of teeth. Anyway, then handlers get annoyed, hire post-colonial death-squad, burn entire forest to the ground killing all the fuzzy woodland creatures including naughty hare.”

It was Gaby’s turn to snort this time and Illya’s smile had turned up the corners of his lips very slightly.

"What did the hare do again?" she had asked, just to annoy him, but he was stubbornly unmoved.

"The hare was very naughty. That's not the point. Is exercise. To see who is best."

"Yes, but why the hare? Why not the squirrel? Or the porcupine?"

"Because the hare was asking too many questions, Gaby. Let him finish his joke," Napoleon had cut in, actually sounding fairly exasperated. 

“Finally is turn of KGB—”

“After the woodland has been suburbanised and burned to the ground?” Gaby hadn’t been able to help herself.

“Gaby, it’s a joke,” Illya had said with supreme patience, “Ok. So KGB send in two agents with strict orders. ‘Apprehend hare or die trying. If you fail, one way ticket to Siberia, understood?’ ‘Yessir.’ So KGB agents return within 36 hours, mission successful—” Napoleon had started to complain that he’d thought this had been meant to be a joke, but Illya had held up one silencing finger as he finished, “—They are frogmarching bear ahead of them who is sobbing, ‘Yes! It’s me! I confess! I confess! I am the rabbit you were looking for!’”

Again, Napoleon and Illya had both laughed, but Gaby had been unable to. Perhaps more than the moment Illya had chosen not to follow his orders and kill Napoleon, this had been Illya telling them something—but Gaby had a hard time understanding what he was trying to say. And tonight, as he joked with his fellow countrymen, Gaby wondered if there was anyone in the Soviet Union left who acted out of anything other than terror.

_“Audrey, I’ve had a difficult day at work, will you pour me a drink?”_

_“Of course, darling,”_ the young soldier was making himself laugh, with his comedy voice, _“Shall I mix you a cocktail?”_

_“I’m not in the mood for a cocktail. Ivana Ivanovna, do you have something better for me to drink?”_

Illya had put the cork back into the bottle of vodka he’d grabbed from the table as he’d been dragged away and now he tore it from the bottle savagely with his teeth with a pop and spat it out onto the floor to a cheer, he grinned roguishly for a moment before downing the little that was left in the bottle to more cheers. Gaby, absurdly, drunkenly felt herself blush as he took the mouth of the bottle from his lips. He held the bottle up threateningly like a club.

_“You’ll have to fight me if you want any of this, my love.”_

_“Now for a demonstration of seduction,”_ Oliynik said breathlessly, after Illya had chased him around the room a couple times pretending to hit him about the head with the empty bottle as he yelped and darted away, shouting obscenities Gaby couldn’t hope to work out.

‘Audrey’ fixed her eyes on Napoleon, who was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. He held up his hands defensively, his eyes widening, “No, no, no, no, no!” But the young soldier was approaching him already and everyone had turned to look at them. 

_“Such a handsome, American man! Please, save me from these monsters! Take me somewhere safe!”_

_“With all due respect,”_ Napoleon was answering in his clean, Moskow accented Russian that Illya had helped him perfect, _“I can’t.”_

The young soldier was upon him now and ran a finger along his jaw, but he was laughing too hard to go on and the crowd groaned as he shook his head and backed away. 

_“Ivana Ivanovna, why don’t you show the lovely Audrey how it’s done?”_

The soldiers started cheering again and Gaby watched Napoleon swallow nervously as Illya stepped through the crowd towards where he was sitting. He adjusted the kerchief, a kitchen towel really, that had slipped during his earlier chase. He looked Napoleon up and down and licked his lips, eyes comically narrowed, eliciting yet another delighted roar from the soldiers watching him. Gaby put two fingers in her mouth and whistled shrilly. Napoleon was leaning so far back in his chair it was in danger of tipping, his posture incredibly tense where moments ago it had been insouciant. Gaby had never seen him look so terrified in his life. She could almost see his pulse beating in his neck and the crowd of soldiers felt his terror and it made them wild.

Illya gripped the front of his shirt roughly and pulled him in one movement to his feet so that they were face to face. Napoleon’s hands came up against Illya’s chest, holding himself at a distance. 

_“I’m going to eat him alive,”_ Illya said to peals of laughter before ducking suddenly to put his shoulder between Napoleon’s legs and lift him onto his shoulders as if he wasn’t the width of two normal men. Napoleon yelped, truly caught by surprise and Gaby saw his flushed cheeks and look of outrage as Illya carried him away a few steps before having to put him down for fear of stumbling. They reached out to help steady each other and Illya laughed against Napoleon’s shoulder, his whole body shaking with mirth.


	2. They must be so confident that he's really asleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Illya and Gaby wax philosophical and maybe a little poetic. Napoleon is there.

They had taken a little coal brazier and a pile of scratchy wool blankets onto the deck of the ship to get some fresh air and watch the sunrise — Gaby wouldn’t later be able to remember whose idea it had been. But it was a good one. It was bracingly cold outside, a crisp November morning, but the clean smell of the sea was pleasant after all the smoke belowdecks. The sea was calm, stretching out endlessly on all sides and a broad, pink sun was climbing slowly over the horizon they had oriented themselves towards.

Napoleon was wearing a borrowed sheepskin ushanka and several layers of wool socks and he fell asleep with his head in Gaby’s lap pretty much the instant they had all settled down, cocooned tightly in a blanket. Gaby found herself once more inside of Illya’s coat, with her own fur-lined hood drawn up around her face and a blanket draped over both them and the brazier so that her feet were almost too hot. 

She was listening to Illya explain with great enthusiasm how naval navigation was being revolutionised by satellites and how, with a little cooperation from certain world powers, no ship would ever get lost at sea again. They’d switched to German once Napoleon had fallen asleep and occasionally, Illya hesitated briefly while he chose his words, making Gaby smile. 

His voice should have sounded harsh in her ears, accented in Russian, speaking enthusiastically about Soviet military technology, reminding her at every turn that he was to be feared. Instead it was soothing, both in its familiarity and its warmth and sonorous quality. It was so rare to hear him say more than a single sentence, a few clipped syllables. The drink had certainly loosened his tongue. She could feel his chest at her back, his throat just above her, generating that deep stirring sound. She was paying so much attention to its languid quality that she stopped hearing his words.

_“You know Solo thinks we’re like two teenagers in love,”_ she said, interrupting him. It was easy to breach the subject when she didn’t have his keen gaze focused on her face. Illya laughed quietly, pulled her a little tighter to his chest.

_“I don’t think it’s love he’s thinking about.”_ Gaby felt her heart squeeze a little tighter at that suggestion. She had never heard Illya allude to sex before, even as delicately as that, unless he was making a very rare crass joke, usually at Napoleon’s expense.

_“Solo isn’t used to thinking of women as his equals,”_ Illya went on when Gaby didn’t say anything in response.

_“”Oh? How does he think of them?”_

_“Any women he’s ever worked with have been his subordinates, lesser than him. To him, a woman is a piece of tasteful decoration in the office. Excuse me but, an ass to squeeze in passing.”_ Gabby couldn’t quite with-hold a chuckle and she could hear Illya’s smile in his voice as he went on, _“And even though he respects you, his experience and his culture have taught him to believe that you should be swooning at all times. His culture sells him sex, sells him his own irresistibility.”_

_“And your culture teaches you to respect women as your equals?”_ Gaby’s voice was scornful. Illya was quiet for a moment, but she could feel in the easiness of his body that he was only thinking.

_“Certainly some of us are trying. It takes more than a generation, I think, to reverse hundreds of years of oppression. But I don’t think of you as Napoleon does.”_

_“As a sexual object?”_ Gaby asked.

_“As something to be won, or done, I suppose.”_ Gaby twisted her head a little and what she could see, one pane of his face, seemed to be blushing. She resisted the urge to tease and settled down again. 

_“Do you think maybe you’re not giving him enough credit?”_

_“What do you think, Gaby?”_

Even though he couldn’t see her, she hunkered down in the collar of her coat and smiled against the fabric. They’d spent enough time together, the three of them, for Illya to have revealed himself as an idealist in spite of his many reservations. Gaby had never known a man so committed to honour and doing the right thing and so certain of what the right thing was. They had talked before about feminism, they’d read Simone de Beauvoir together, sharing notes. Napoleon made it clear he thought it was an act: Soviet propaganda personified. He couldn’t truly believe, it seemed, that Illya could be better than him in a way that came down to social rather than personal morals, because in spite of himself, Solo believed in the system he worked to defend.

_“You think he thinks so little of me?”_

Illya breathed out through his nose, _“It’s not so simple. He_ knows _you. You’re an individual. He believes so firmly we’re all just individuals that he doesn’t even think he puts those individuals firmly into groups.”_

_“None of us finds it easy to think of another person as—”_ Gaby trailed off, but she could feel Illya nod all the same.

_“That every single person feels and suffers and thinks as deeply as yourself…”_ Illya shuddered at the thought and Gaby knew he was thinking of every bullet and blow that had ever found its mark.

_“How did you manage to turn a conversation about sex into this?”_ She asked after giving him a moment, digging her elbow into his side. 

_“I believe you actually said_ love _when you started the conversation,”_ he answered, as evasive and unreadable as ever.

_“I think he really does think it’s love,”_ Gaby said with a snort, _“I don’t think he thinks you’re capable of sex for its own sake. Ascetic monk that you are.”_

He didn’t answer for a long time and Gaby suddenly asked herself why the hell she was even having this conversation with him. But then she remembered Istanbul and the dreaded knot in her stomach when his radio signal had been cut off and the unbelievable relief she’d felt when he was _there_ at the rendezvous point, exactly where he’d said he’d be. She had thrown her arms around his neck and climbed his impossibly long body until her lips had pressed firmly to his, until she’d tasted life on his breath, before he’d put her down gently. And she remembered every time his hand had wavered before touching her, too many times to count.

_“You know I’m not a monk,”_ he said, his voice impossibly low, a frequency that vibrated through her bones rather than her eardrums. Gaby’s mouth watered and her fingers crept under the back of Napoleon’s hat and into the hair at the nape of his neck.

_“No,”_ Gaby conceded, _“you’re an atheist.”_

_“Emotions run high in our line of work. We’re always overproducing one stimulant or another. It doesn’t have to mean anything if you kiss me because you’re relieved I’m still alive.”_ So even, so rational. Gaby shifted again, tilting her head back against his shoulder.

_“And if I wanted to kiss you now?”_

_“Drunk. And overtired.”_

_“And if I wanted to kiss you the day after tomorrow when I’ve had a solid night’s sleep and a good breakfast?”_

_“You’ll be jetlagged.”_ She could see the edge of his smile now. 

_“Do you think it would hurt our working relationship?”_

_“Do you think it wouldn’t?”_

_“Maybe it would help.”_

_“I suppose we’ll have to see about that sometime when neither of us is ailing or intoxicated.”_

He squeezed her shoulder to take the bite off what was very clearly an end to the conversation rather than a promise, but absurdly Gaby felt pleased. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm trying to square the personalities I feel Illya, Gaby, and Napoleon have with their politics and with their work in as light a way as I can, let me know if I've succeeded.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a few ideas for a set of stories that might all fit together, perhaps some slightly more salacious and romantically inclined than this one!


End file.
